[Sigia-l] Texts in e-book (Microsoft/Adobe Reader) format

[Leslie Johnston]

The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library 
(http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/) has been supporting the creation of ebooks 
from electronic texts for a few years now.  I don;'t find it too onerous to 
read with the Ebook reader on my screen.  For printing the Etext Center has 
been developing scripts to transform the same XML documents used to create 
the ebooks into well-formatted printable PDFs.

At this past JCDL meeting a paper was presented written by one of the Etext 
staff along with a Microsoft researcher, based on case studies for use in 
the classroom ("Reading-in-the-Small: A Study of Reading on Small Form 
Factor Devices," by Catherine C. Marshall and Christine Ruotolo / 
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=544220.544230).  It was an overall 
good experience for the students.  I have personally tried it on my Palm 
and find the screen real estate to be the biggest issue..

That said, I went to a keynote presentation last month at the Digital 
Library Federation meeting by Bill Hill, the head of the Electronic Books 
project at Microsoft Research.  He gave an excellent talk (which is sadly 
not available online) on all of the pros and cons for reading ebooks, and 
showed one of the new tablet devices using ClearType technology.  It was 
impressive.

Leslie

At 10:17 AM 12/10/2002 -0800, Richard Law wrote:
>In addition to hardcover and soft cover books, Amazon sells e-books. I'm
>curious to know if anyone on the list has read an e-book version of a book:
>Microsoft Reader or Adobe Reader. If so, what are your impressions of the
>user experience compared to text on paper? Thanks!
>
>Cheers,
>
>Richard
>
>.....................................................
>
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------------
Leslie Johnston
Director, Digital Services Integration
University of Virginia Library
johnston at virginia.edu